"If I made more, it would allow me to not have to work two jobs," Reed said as she watched travelers hurriedly roll their luggage from one side of the food court to the other. The east-side resident also works part time at Meijer to make ends meet.

Reed, and nearly 100 cashiers, coffee baristas, janitors and service workers at the airport, argue that the city's recent move to increase municipal workers' minimum wage to $13 an hour should apply to them, too.

In August, the City-County Council passed a proposal that sets a $13 "living wage" for city and county staff members. There are 365 workers earning $9.13 to $12.98 per hour who work for the city and county that will be eligible for pay increases.

That is why workers like Reed plan to take their fight straight to their employer, HMS Host, a private airport food service company based in Bethesda, Md.

HMS Host told IndyStar that it is optimistic about upcoming contract negotiations with the airport workers, who are represented by the Unite Here Local 23 union in Indianapolis.

Buy Photo

Benjamin Calbert shows off his union shirt at Indianapolis International Airport, where some workers are seeking a minimum wage of at least $13 an hour.(Photo: Michelle Pemberton/IndyStar)

"While we don’t discuss the specifics of negotiations, we have had successful negotiations with Local 23 in the past, and we expect this one to follow the same course," HMS spokeswoman Lina Mizerek said in an email to IndyStar.

A public-private partnership is a contractual arrangement between a public agency and a private sector entity to deliver a service or facility for the use of the general public. In this case, the airport.

Former Republican Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, now a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, did the country's first major full outsourcing of an airport at the Indianapolis International Airport in 1995.

"I wanted to market-test whether a private company that specializes in airport management, with access to worldwide technology and best practices, could produce more customer satisfaction, better airline relationships and more net revenue while holding down increases in passenger enplanement costs," Goldsmith told Governing Magazine in April.

The idea was to both "improve passenger satisfaction and enhance the airport's net revenues."

Goldsmith declined to respond to IndyStar requests to comment for this article.

President Donald Trump's administration promotes the benefits of having local governments work with private corporations to build and manage federal and local government roads, bridges and airports.

However, a June New York Times report says little hard evidence exists that such public-private partnerships perform better than government control alone over time.

And in this case, the partnership makes demands for wage increases by workers more difficult.

Timothy Bond, a labor economics professor at Purdue University, said there are challenges for workers who are part of mixed-government and private-sector jobs who collectively lobby for raises.

"On one hand, private enterprise is concerned with its own profits," Bond said.

The government? Not as much, he says.

"You can do a lot more bargaining with the government that you can with private enterprises."

Other airport workers say the wage increase means the difference between a life of survival and a life worth living.

Benjamin Calbert, a 39-year-old cook at HMS Host, says he would like to buy a car so he can drive to work every day.

Buy Photo

Benjamin Calbert stands in the food court at the Col. H. Weir Cook Terminal at Indianapolis International Airport. He is a cook at the airport.(Photo: Michelle Pemberton/IndyStar)

Now, Calbert, who makes $11.35 per hour, catches the bus back and forth from his east-side home every day. Each trip takes 90 minutes.

"The money I make is enough to survive on but not enough to live on," Calbert told IndyStar.

"If I had the money to buy a vehicle I could plan a life. To me, the wage increase means I could get married and be able to support a family."

City-County Council President Maggie Lewis led the effort to raise city worker raises.

The idea was that seeing the impact on city workers also would inspire private companies to pay fair wages to workers, Lewis said in May.

Lewis did not respond to IndyStar requests for comment.

Marquita Walker, a labor studies professor at Indiana University, says there is an incentive for private companies to give workers raises if a city does not force private employers to raise wages in kind.

"At some point, private firms will raise wages to keep workers around so as to prevent mass turnover," she said, adding that public-private partnerships are only growing in popularity.

To Reed, the Starbucks barista, it's about her ability to plan for the future.

"It's an incentive for me to stay here," she said.

"Sometimes a company just has to deal with the fact that its employees need more."